Zapatistas – 11 years on, a retreat and a consolidation

This article was for publication in Red and Black Revolution, Autumn 2005. News has just come through through of a Zapatista communique that appears to be a preparation for a return to war. At this stage it is not clear what is about to happen so I am releasing the article as I think it provides a useful background of events in the last couple of years and the sort of reasons why the Zapatistas might have decided to return to armed struggle.

Zapatistas - 11 years on, a retreat and a consolidation

The Zapatistas were one of the major influences on the development
of the libertarian wing of globalization movement. What happens to
them is significant not just for Mexico but also for the direction
that movement takes. In recent years the direction of the Zapatistas
has shifted from trying to spark off similar movements elsewhere to
consolidating what they have in Chiapas. If not a physical defeat for
the Zapatistas this certainly represents a significant scaling down
of their hopes.

I've already written at length about the positive aspects of
the way
the Zapatistas organize and I don't intend to repeat the detail
of that argument here. To summarise - the non-military side of the
organization is organized in a libertarian fashion through elected
mandated and recallable delegates who are rotated at regular
intervals. Regionally these delegates form 32 Autonomous Councils.
The military side (EZLN) is hierichcal but the EZLN command is
however answerable to the system of delegate councils. It doesn't
make decisions on behalf of the people like most clandestine armies.

In any history of the left defeats and retreats and the often
unspoken side of the victories and advances. The heroic early days of
the Russian or Spanish revolutions are far more attractive then the
later months and years which were not only complex but also ended in
betrayal of many of the ideals of those revolutions. Everyone on the
left knows of the student and worker uprising of 1968, few consider
why it vanished or how it ended within months with De Gaulles
re-election. On a recent more minor level the left has not yet come
to terms with the retreat of the anti-war movement after its peak in
terms of numbers on February 15th 2003.

The simple fact is that most of the time we will fail in what we
try to achieve because the forces that we are fighting are so strong.
While the numbers we can typically mobilize will sometimes have the
effect of being enough of a nusiance to force a change in direction
by ruling class we can only defeat them in a revolution that unites
the vast bulk of society, the working class, against them. And that
is unlikely to happen tomorrow. Until then we need to be able to deal
with defeats and partial victories, most importantly we need to be
able to argue when there is a clear need to retreat because to
continue trying to advance would mean needless losses for no benefit.

The Zapatistas have not yet been defeated but Mexican capital has
managed to stabilize and indeed moderinise itself in the period since
1994. The possibilities of sparking a more general insurrection
appear to have receeded. A de facto 70 year dictatorship was replaced
with a 'democracy' that was able to use the carrot of eliminating the
worst of the repression and corruption to modernize and stabilize
capital.

This has left the Zapatistas in a very exposed position. At the
time of the 1994 uprising they expected that either they would spark
a general rising in what was then a very unstable Mexico or that the
army would rapidly crush them. What was not expected was that there
would be a huge mobilization of civil society demanding an end to
military action against them. In the decade that followed they
attempted to turn this mobilization in defence of their right to
exist into a mobilization to transform Mexico (and indeed the world)
with them.

At the same time the Zapatistas were constructing in Chiapas a
self management project for their communities of some 32 regional
councils each of which brought together delegates from a few dozen
villages. The government recognized that attempts to militarily crush
the Zapatistas destabilized Mexico in general so they opted to
ignoring the Zapatistas while pumping limited funds into
anti-Zapatista communities. This had the desired effect of confusing
the situation for outsiders as the military and police were less and
less involved and instead conflicts between such communities came to
the fore.

What is happening is interesting in another way than what I have
already talked about. It also should cause us to re-think some of
what we understand by dual power. Dual power is where side by side
you have a state and revolutionary structures designed to replace the
state.

Traditionally it us understood that you cannot have a long running
situation of dual power. That fairly fast either the state must crush
these new structures or be replaced by them. The key moments of
revolutions are often those moments when the state moves against such
structures be it Petrograd in October 1917, Kronstadt in March 1921
or Barcelona in May 1937. There are even examples from Ireland as in
the 7 day period when the workers unions ran the city of Limerick in
1919 during the 'Limerick soviet'. The success or failures of such a
move determine the outcome of the months of constructive self
management that preceeded them.

The crushing may not need to be physical. A massive two year wave
of workers self management and factory occupations was resolved in
favour of the state in Portugal in 1974. In Argentina today the
factories are being taken back into the capitalist economy as much by
compromise and the offering of reforms as by open conflict.

Yet the Zapatistas structures have survived for over 11 years and
there current strategy seems to be based around an indefinite
consolidation of these structures - perhaps until a point is reached
where changes in the general situation in put revolution back on the
agenda. This process seems to have started in the wake of the march
on Mexico city in March 2001. After the usual long period of silence
which indicates a lot of internal discussion the Zapatistas announced
that the Auguscalantes (where big external meetings were once held)
were becoming Caracols or the centres of Zapatista internal
organization. These were to be the centres of the 'juntas of good
government' (although in English junta is assumed to mean
dictatorship in fact it just means council). The Caracols would also
serve as contact points between the Zapatistas and the outside world.

What exactly this meant was not all that clear until on the 15th
of August 2004 when Marcos released a set of 8 communiques most of
which fleshed out in a fair amount of detail just what the Zapatistas
were up to. In many ways these are among the most important documents
of the rebellion and it is worth taking the time to read them in
detail.

From these documents we learn that the 'good government juntas'
follow the libertarian structures established by the other layers of
Zapatista self-management. That is they are composed of mandated
delegates answerable to those that delegate them. The individual
delegates who make up each junta are rotated in an incredibly rapid
fashion. According to Marcos these rotations vary from every "eight
to 15 days (according to the region)". The delegates are themselves
drawn from the members of the Autonomous Councils. Because these are
rotated in turn (over a longer period which seems to be a year) this
means that by the time every one an AC has been on the junta a new AC
is created.

As might be imagined this is driving outsiders who need to have
regular contact with the Zapatistas (eg NGO's) nuts because it means
every time you go to a 'good government junta' you are dealing with a
different set of people from your last visit. This is by design as
Marcos explained

"If this is analyzed in depth, it will be seen that it
is a process where entire villages are learning to govern.

The advantages? Fine, one of them is that it's more difficult for
an authority to go too far and, by arguing how "complicated" the task
of governing is, to not keep the communities informed about the use
of resources or decision making. The more people who know what it's
all about, the more difficult it will be to deceive and to lie. And
the governed will exercise more vigilance over those who govern.

It also makes corruption more difficult. If you manage to corrupt
one member of the JBG, you will have to corrupt all the autonomous
authorities, or all the rotations, because doing a "deal" with just
one of them won't guarantee anything (corruption also requires
"continuity"). Just when you have corrupted all the councils, you'll
have to start over again, because by then there will have been a
change in the authorities, and the one you "arranged" won't work any
longer. And so you'll have to corrupt virtually all the adult
residents of the zapatista communities. Although, obviously, it's
likely that once you've achieved that, the children will have already
grown up and then, once again"

One organisational issue libertarians have always struggled with
arises out of the recognition that even people with no formal power
can gain power if they occupy a post and so become the only person
with the skills and contacts required for that post. The solution
advocated for this problem has always been to limit the amount of
time anyone can serve in such a post. The Zapatistas have taken this
concept to a whole new level which is intended to also provide a
direct experience in such administration and the decision making that
goes with it to a large percentage of the population.

However the formation of the Juntas is also a recognition of the
need to consolidate the gains of the last few years. Or to put that
another way the new strategy is a retreat from a position of helping
to transform Mexico and the world to one of building indigenous
autonomy locally.

The Zapatistas calculate they will be allowed the space for this
construction because they have heard that the government expects them
to fail and so is content to wait for failure. As Marcos claims
"Someone else recommended letting them do it, waiting for the failure
and preparing the "I told you so" along with the military advance by
the federal Army on zapatista positions. ...What I'm recounting
actually took place at the meetings of Vicente Fox' cabinet"

The Zapatista experience of the previous decade however also shows
that small local conflicts can escalate into excuses for state
involvement. So in terms of the decisions made by these councils they
have sought to eliminate as far as possible areas where conflict with
the state or excuses for stated intervention might arrive.

Law and order

Up to 2004 the Zapatistas had refused any contact with the Mexican
courts or police. However serious crimes like rape and murder could
create the circumstances where the police would be ordered to
intervene and this in turn could escalate as their intervention was
resisted. So now with some serious anti-social crimes the Zapatistas
intend to investigate them and then hand the evidence and possibly
the suspect over to the state to be dealt with.

Inter community conflict

In the 1990's the assumption had been that any conflict between
Zapatista and non-Zapatista communities had the hand of the state
behind it. This is because for a number of years, culminating in the
Acteal massacre when 45 indigenous were murdered by paramilitaries,
the state was indeed behind many such conflicts. It was using the
classic 'low intensity conflict' strategy as taught to some 3,000
Mexico soldiers in Fort Brag, Texas.

From 2003 the Zapatistas were no longer assuming the hidden hand
of the state in all local conflicts. Instead each conflict is being
investigated and a process of arbitration followed to resolve the
conflict. In 2004 it was claimed this was avoiding a repeat of many
of the escalations of the past.

Elections

The Zapatistas do not believe the changes they want will come
through the electoral system. In the past this has resulted in
conflict as the government tried to open polling stations in
Zapatista areas and the Zapatistas sometimes responded by burning the
ballot boxes. Now the individual JBG's have written to the commission
saying they will facilitate polling stations but they want the
commission to respect the fact that Zapatistas won't be voting.

As an aside to this it is worth noting that the most serious act
of violence of 2003/4 was when several Zapatistas were shot and
wounded by an ambush which appears to have been carried out by PRD
members. The PRD is the Mexican section of the 2nd international, (ie
the Labour Party) and its role in this ambush seems to be confirmed
by the statement the local PRD put out saying that maybe the
Zapatista will learn a lesson about boycotting elections from this!

Drug trafficking

The Zapatista communities have always not only banned illegal
drugs but also alcohol because they saw it as tightly linked to
domestic violence. Drugs are the favorite public excuse in the
Americas for the US military to get involved in conflicts so the
Zapatistas have taken the step of formalizing the drug ban. The JBGs
have been given the responsibility of checking for people growing
drugs and destroying any that are found.

Stolen cars

As well as requiring vehicles in their areas to register with the
JBG's they have said " In order to prevent the zapatista regions from
becoming sanctuaries for stolen and illegally imported automobiles,
the registrations granted by the JBG will only be given to those who
have their regularized, official paper".

Environment

Several of the Zapatista communities are in or on the borders of a
very important nature reserve. Early in 2004 it appears they pulled
all or most of the communities out of the reserve itself. Now they
are also saying trees can "only be cut for domestic needs, not for
selling" and that if you cut one down you must plant and care for two
saplings.

People smuggling

Chiapas is the major route for people smuggling from Central
America through Mexico to the USA. There is a considerable force of
'Migration police' in Chiapas intended to stop the unauthorised
movement of people across the border. Indeed for years the main
problem for international observers in Chiapas was dodging this
migration police who doubled up as an anti-observer force. If they
stopped you more than a couple of times away from the tourist areas
you were likely to be deported - and hundreds of international
observers were in the 1990's.

Zapatista law now forbids Zapatistas making any money from the
'people trafficing' trade yet the communities are also required to
feed migrants (and they are not allowed to charge for this food). It
also targets the people smugglers so that "All those trafficking in
persons (or polleros) who are discovered and detained in zapatista
territory shall be obligated to return any monies to the affected
persons and, after being warned, and if they repeat their crime, they
shall be turned over to the proper authorities in order to be
punished according to the laws of Mexico."

All of these compromises involve a recognition of the right of the
Mexican state to impose its rule in the Zapatista areas. Indeed we
are told that " the Good Government Juntas maintain respectful
contact with different social organizations, with many of the
official municipal governments with which the autonomies share land,
and, in some cases, with the state government. Recommendations are
exchanged, and they seek to resolve problems through dialogue."

The Zapatistas remain just about the only large scale example in
the modern world of libertarian organisational principles in
operation. Because of this - despite these compromises - there is
much that can continue to be learned from them.

Andrew

Afterword

This article was for publication in Red and Black Revolution,
Autumn 2005. However while being worked on in June news came through
of a
Zapatista
communique that appears to be a preparation for a return to war.
At this stage (a few hours later) it is not clear what is about to
happen but I am releasing the article as I think it provides a useful
background of events in the last couple of years and the sort of
reasons why the Zapatistas might have decided to return to armed
struggle. On the other hand it is also possible that the Zapatista
communique is simply a reaction to either military provocation or
paramilitary threats and that this situation will be quickly
resolved. (Tue 21 June)

First published on Anarkismo.net

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